Wow, long time no talk. The past couple of months have been an absolute blur. For one, I hit my 1 year mark in Peru (Sept 13). CRAZY how time flies. For the first two weeks in September, I went back to the states for Eric and Andreas’ wedding in Santa Fe, and to see the rest of the family in Boulder and Colorado Springs. I actually stepped foot back in Lima’s Jorge Chavez Airport on the exact day of my 1-year anniversary. A very weird deja vu moment to see where my whole cohort took our first Peru photo, and where we walked to the buses which started us on this journey.

Leading up to my 2-week hiatus, I buckled down for the month of August. And I must say it was the most rewarding month of service. My main focus was giving health sessions at school. With my class of 14-15 year olds, I set up a series of nutrition classes over the course of 4 weeks. We covered 3 topics:

• Basic nutrition (i.e. food groups, what they each do for our bodies, etc.)
• Anemia and other diet-related sicknesses
• My favorite – a healthy plate competition, where I assigned 4 groups of 4-5 students, and each had to bring in a healthy plate and present on the ingredients and nutritional value. The kids really impressed me. I was so afraid that no one would bring anything, but they honestly exceeded my expectations. I invited the health post’s nutritionist to the class, and together, him and I ranked the plates based on 5 categories: name of the plate, presentation, look, flavor, and nutritional value.

My 2nd series of classes for the month of August was with 15-16 year olds focused on sexual and reproductive health. Those sessions included:

• Birth control methods available at the health post, and how they work. This was accompanied by an overview of the female reproductive system, and the biological process behind getting pregnant.
• Sexually-Transmitted Diseases. I invited the health post’s OBGYN to this session, who is also in charge of adolescent health.
• Toxic vs. Healthy relationships, and the early signs of violence. I created (well chat GPT created) 4 great case studies of early signs of manipulation, violence, etc. that the students read and discussed. I invited the school psychologist to this one.

August held even more events: my Peace Corps friends Maddie and Carolina (both youth development volunteers, as opposed to health) both invited me to their towns to give nutrition/sexual health talks to their students. Maddie lives 25 minutes away in Caraz, the biggest city in the area (about 17,000 people). Carolina lives about 45 minutes away, in a tiny town like mine.

Also in August, I visited two of my friend’s sites to experience their “fiestas” – each filled with dance performances, music, beer, and fireworks. And, the month finished off with celebrating Gma Vicky’s 87th birthday. Vicky is the matriarch of the beautiful, very large family that I live with. It was a very special night hearing everyone’s speeches about her.

The week after getting home from the States, the school celebrated “Día de la Juventud” or Youth Day. This included 2 events: a full-day field trip to Chimbote (beach town about 5 hours away), and a morning of singing/dancing/acting performances by the teachers, in front of the students. For the former, I travelled with one of my classes, about fifteen 14-15 year olds. While most of the day was spent in transportation, it was very fun bonding with them in the sea, and teaching a few how to swim. As for the teacher performances, I appeared in 3 acts: a dance that in reality went terribly, given our lack of preparation, an act where I played the role of ex-President Toledo’s wife, as she was a foreigner, and the 3rd was an unexpected, solo huaino performance in front of the whole school (a teacher was performing and pulled me up to dance with him). Both the beach day and performances helped me gain points with the kiddos, so it was all worth it.

Flash forward to the month of October, and work-wise I have mainly been focused on writing a grant. Peace Corps offers volunteers 1 grant, right around the 1-year mark of service. My grant is focused on training our community health agents (CHAs). Pueblo Libre already has a strong CHA program, in which about 20 community members, trained by the health post, visit mothers and pregnant women across the district. The goal for my grant is to train the CHAs to run their own nutrition sessions by March/April of 2025 (Peace Corps funds wouldn’t arrive until January). Nutrition sessions are a big part of Peru’s strategy to battle childhood anemia, in which a health agent or nutritionist puts together plates depending on a baby’s age, answers any nutritional questions mothers may have, etc. Right now, sessions are only offered at the health post, and in the last year, attendance has been pretty low. This is mainly due to the distance mothers have to travel to get to the health post. So, the idea of the grant is to bring sessions to the mother’s neighborhood instead of making them come to the health center. My grant application has officially been submitted, so now it’s just a matter of waiting. If all goes well, this project should be my main focus for the second year of service.

Other than the grant, I have been expanding my sex ed sessions to other classrooms, to reach the most amount of kids. I’ve also been coordinating many o’ things for the coming week, as a boss from Peace Corps Washington will be visiting my site to see what life is like for a health volunteer in Peru. In the same week, the new cohort of health volunteers will also be visiting my site, meeting my colleagues, giving a couple sessions at school, all to prepare for their 2 years of service.

In non-work related things, I went hiking/camping last week to the beautiful Laguna Churup (14,600 feet elevation) with 2 Peace Corps friends. To get there, we took a 45 minute bus ride from Huaraz, followed by a 2 hour hike to our campsite. Another 30 minutes of rope climbing up the mountain, we arrived at the laguna. So peaceful and magnificent. I will say it till the day I day – Ancash is such an un-talked about, un-touched slice of heaven. Forget the Swiss Alps.